Four of the UK’s largest insurers are preparing for a £460 million hit to profits from the government’s planned cap on pension scheme charges.

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Aviva, Friends Life, Scottish Widows and Standard Life – which run more than £75 billion of company pension funds between them – reported provisions for reductions to future profits from existing business arising from the charge cap. In total, the booked reductions amounted to 20% of the firms’ first-half profits on average.

The fee cap, announced in March and due to be introduced in April next year, is set at 0.75% of pension fund assets. Insurers have argued that the average fee charged by modern pension schemes is about 0.71% of assets. But the provisions disclosed in their first-half reports last week indicate the scale of each firm’s book of older, higher-charging schemes.

Standard Life has made the largest provision: £160 million under the European Embedded Value measure, a metric of insurers’ profitability. It also has the largest book of pensions business, at £29.9 billion.

Aviva reported a provision of £150 million under Market-Consistent Embedded Value, a different metric of profitability, so its figure may not be directly comparable to Standard Life’s. Friends Life, with a £21 billion book of corporate pensions business, made a £50 million provision, also under MCEV.

Scottish Widows, meanwhile, which runs pensions worth £25 billion, reported a hit of £100 million to “underlying profit” as a result of the cap.

A Standard Life spokeswoman said the firm was “well placed to help employers comply with the new charge cap”. Aviva, Friends and Scottish Widows declined to comment or did not return calls.